Box Office: Seven Reasons Why 'King Arthur' Bombed

Scott Mendelson
, ContributorI cover the film industry.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Warner Bros., Village Roadshow and RatPac-Dune

'King Arthur: Legend of the Sword'

Pretty much like the headline says. As of writing, the $175 million-budgeted King Arthur: Legend of the Sword has earned $15.365m domestic and $44.4m worldwide, with little reason for anything resembling hope. The film is probably going to lose around $150m for Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc., Village Roadshow, RatPac-Dune and friends. The picture, disappointing as it is, serves as a prime example of everything that can go wrong with this kind of mega-budget film. So, without further ado, here's exactly what went wrong.

1. You need actual movie stars.

We've been playing this game for several years, with various young, white male hunks being given a chance to front a very expensive fantasy property and then acting shocked when they don't turn out to be the next Tom Cruise. As much as Hollywood wants to try to discover the next Hugh Jackman or Chris Hemsworth, you really do need something resembling a movie star when the budgets are this big and the property isn't inherently a slam dunk.

If you have a movie star, you get at least a shot at Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves or Sherlock Holmes. Otherwise, you're just The Phantom,John Carter,Battleship or Robocop. Concept and IP may be king, but, at the very least, you need someone to get general audiences interested in the film on the media circuit. A somewhat generic white guy who looks good with his shirt off isn't going to cut it, especially if he's not surrounded by bigger names.

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2. Not every known male hero needs their Batman Begins.

Just because audiences flocked to a prequel origin story for the Dark Knight doesn't mean that they desire such a thing for the likes of Peter Pan, King Arthur or even Green Lantern. This isn't just Warner Bros.' issue, as Universal and friends spent $200 million on a Robin Hood origin story seven years ago and Walt Disney lost a fortune on John Carter and The Lone Ranger, but they seem to be the prime offenders at the moment.

The blowout success of Tim Burton's Batman didn't mean that audiences wanted a bunch of adaptations of 1930s/1940s pulp heroes (Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow, The Phantom, etc.) The success of Chris Nolan's Batman Begins does not mean that audiences want to see the minuscule minutiae of every pop culture character's origin story laid out in Saw-like detail.

3. Don't make us wait for the sequel to get what we came to see this time.

Moreover, the film made the classic origin story mistake of spending the entire film setting up the known status quo instead of actually giving us a movie we wanted to see. See also: Jem and the Holograms, Fantastic Four (all three origin story movies), Ridley Scott's Robin Hood and Pan.

The likes of Batman Begins, Casino Royale, Star Trek and Spider-Man spent plenty of time on origin story tropes but also gave us plenty of material with the core characters fully suited up and doing their trademark heroics. It should be noted that two of the biggest of these would-be literary franchises (Sherlock Holmes and the too expensive The Legend of Tarzan) were not origin stories.

Don't give us "the story before the story," just give us the darn story.

4. Don't let reshoots turn the film into a massively expensive proposition.

Guy Ritchie tends to be comparatively cheap (Man from U.N.C.L.E. cost $75 million while Sherlock Holmes and A Game of Shadows cost $90m and $120m respectively), so I was willing to believe that $102m budget that was listed on IMDB and elsewhere for nearly a year. It is no secret that the film underwent massive reshoots (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey is not playing Guinevere) and the final cut seems to use Guy Ritchie's trademark narrative roundabouts to hide missing storytelling.

And if the movie works then all the reshoots in the world don't matter. But, speculation alert, this may have been a case like The Wolfman which reshot itself in the foot when a $90m period-piece horror movie turned into a $150m period-piece horror movie. I appreciate the whole "make the best movie possible" mentality, but spending copious additional funds to shape a mediocrity into a mediocrity isn't a good business strategy.

5. Just because audiences have heard of a property doesn't mean they crave a mega-budget movie version.

This was probably the big, general lesson of last year's disappointing summer. Just because folks have heard of a character or remember the first movie in a given series doesn't mean they crave a new cinematic version of said character or a sequel to said original. Come what may, King Arthur has never really been box office dynamite (First Knight, Quest for Camelot and King Arthur all bombed or disappointed). Yes, Excalibur was a hit in 1981, but that was at a time when movies on the scale of Excalibur were true events. Even Monty Python and the Holy Grail wasn't exactly a box-office juggernaut back in 1975.

Ditto the likes of Tarzan, Peter Pan, Green Lantern or John Carter of Mars. Batman Begins, Star Trek, Casino Royale, The Amazing Spider-Man and Rise of the Planet of the Apes were relatively successful because those properties/characters are still quite popular. Aside from the Disney toon, success doesn't mean that studios should have raided the property bin to give every would-be hero an action-filled origin story prequel. Before embarking on a quest for the next fantasy franchise, you need to stop and ask, "Do audiences want to see a movie about this property?"

6. Give us something we can't see on television.

There was a time when a film as big and spectacular as King Arthur: Legend of the Sword would have been a big deal purely because of its scale and spectacle. But that was a long time ago when summer movies only arrived in the summer and where big-scale Hollywood productions were the only place to witness that level of fantastical action and adventure.Now not only does Hollywood drop a would-be tentpole almost every week, but fantasy television like Game of Thrones and Vikings have caught up to the movies in all too many ways.

So if you're going to make a King Arthur movie, go nuts with the fantasy elements, give us more than just a few giant elephants and a big snake surrounded by generic "refusal of the call" origin story tropes. If you want to give folks a reason to leave the house and see something like King Arthur in theaters, give us the kind of spectacle that merits a big screen exhibition. That goes both to spectacle and actual colors. Maybe, just maybe, one of the reasons comic book superhero movies (the MCU, DCEU and Fox films) do as well as they do is partly because they are drenched in rich, vibrant colors as opposed to drowning in "gritty" grays and fog.

7. Don't spend Return of the King money on Fellowship of the Ring.

I realize that I may be contradicting myself, but it is still one of the most ironclad rules for franchise filmmaking. It is one thing to spend big money on a surefire hit sequel to a buzzy original. The first X-Men cost just $75 million, and then Bryan Singer got a snazzy $115m for X2: X-Men United. But spending $115m on the first X-Men would have been a genuine risk. Ditto the likes of Spider-Man ($130m to $220m), Pirates of the Caribbean ($140m to $220m) and The Matrix sequels ($60m to around $150m).

Comparatively, The Lone Ranger wcost $215 million the first time out, before anyone knew if audiences wanted a Long Ranger franchise. $175m is (potentially) what you spend on King Arthur: Return of the Knights after King Arthur: Legend of the Sword snags decent reviews, strong word-of-mouth and at least $400m worldwide on a $100m budget. It's not what you spend the first time around, especially without a movie star and without any proven interest in the property in question.

And that's enough of beating up on this picture, at least for today. On the plus side, Going in Style has made $75 million on a $25m budget and Kong: Skull Island has earned $564m on a $185m budget, or bigger than (inflation notwithstanding) Godzilla ($529m) and King Kong ($550m in 2005 and in 2D). Oh, and I am reasonably confident that Wonder Woman is going to kick box office butt in two weeks. After all, that's a property that folks actually wanted to see turned into a movie.

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